It's The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year...

And I'm not talking about Christmas, although I love that, too. It's the last day of November and therefore, the last day of NaBloPoMo. I shouldn't have undertaken the challenge this year. Between blogging every day for work, moving, Thanksgiving, and everything else that was going on, I just didn't have time to do it properly. But I hope you liked a few of the pictures along the way at least, and it's always good to get back in the habit.

Here's one last picture of Darcy for the month. It represents what she missed so much when we were in Pennsylvania:

And The Move Is Almost Over...

Hurray, hurrah! The movers came today just after ten, and four and a half hours later, they drove away, leaving behind all our stuff. If there were enough moving trucks and people for everyone to have all their belongings delivered the day after Thanksgiving, we could cure the unrepentant consumerism that is Black Friday. Even though we always try to cull before a move, I am still overwhelmed (and not in a good way) by how much stuff we own. And while I am glad to have it all in the house we will now call our home, I wish there was a lot less of it.

So there it all is, in the place we will be calling home. For having a place to call home, I am truly grateful. 

But how do I cull so there is truly less stuff, permanently? I feel like we have gotten rid of all the easy stuff and even some small pieces of the hard stuff. I have dreams of scanning some of the grad school paperwork I feel I shouldn't/can't get rid of, although I have gotten rid of a LOT of grad school stuff already. I have streamlined my book collection -- even my cookbook collection has been weeded through twice! I got rid of a few kitchen things I was hanging onto more for sentiment than for the actual use I get out of them, and there might be a few more things I could give away or sell from kitchen cabinets (well, boxes, at this point).

I've pared down my closet, gotten rid of all my high-heeled shoes, and we aren't knick-knack people, so there aren't many dust-catchers that are being hauled from place to place.

We held a garage sale in PA, Michael sold stuff on Craig's List and gave stuff away via FreeCycle, and we have a few pieces of furniture at an auction house in Delaware Water Gap, waiting to be sold on our behalf.

SO HOW DO WE STILL HAVE THIS MUCH STUFF??

I Am Full

That's the overwhelming feeling for now. I am thankful for being with family today, and for having a bounty of delicious food to cook and share, and for a gloriously sunny day.

But now I am tired and full and too sleepy to write about all the wonderful things in my life. But they are legion.

So TIred...

Woke up at four this morning. I didn't mean to, but I did. By five, it was clear there would be no more sleep for me. I got up, drove to the back house and did the last bits of cleaning there. Then I went to spend time with my cat, who was needy and still anxious about being in a strange, empty house.

I'm now close to comatose and so this is the post you get today.

I hope you all have delicious menus planned for tomorrow.

Out Of One House And Into Another

We now have stuff in three different houses at the 
same time. What is wrong with this picture?

We are comfortably housed in a vacation rental for the next several days, anticipating the arrival of some family for Thanksgiving tomorrow. The dishes I hauled in my car from Pennsylvania are still at the house we've been living in for the past two months. So is a little bit of food. Our clothes and Darcy's books and animals and a LOT of food are in the vacation rental with us. 

But our sweet cat is in our new house, which we sort of, almost took possession of today. She's got her food and water bowls, her bed, the shirt off my back (literally), a scratching post, and a bunch of the stuff that we hauled from Pennsylvania in our cars. I worry that she's lonely, but Michael says she's a cat and she'll be fine. I hope he's right.

On Friday, all the rest of our stuff from PA will be delivered. We tried to pare down our stuff before this move (again) and I hope I will be less stunned by how much stuff comes off the truck. 

But mostly I hope that by the time we leave the vacation rental on Sunday, we can crawl into our very own beds for the first time in three months (for Darcy and me, anyway)!! I'm ready.

Hmmmm...

It's late and I'm tired. The day has been full of packing, moving, cleaning, more cleaning, and tomorrow will be more of the same.

But we all seem to be mostly healthy, we have somewhere(s) to move TO, and we got the news today that our stuff will be delivered on Friday. As in the day after Thanksgiving. As in a day that we have family guests. As in three days earlier than we had requested.

But it doesn't matter! Because what matters is that we should be able to have the carpets cleaned before the stuff arrives and then we will have somewhere to go when the vacation rental runs out on Sunday.

I delivered wine to our wonderful host/neighbors this evening. They have been unbelievably generous with their "back house". Darcy and I have been here almost two months and the only rent I've been allowed to pay is in wine. They live across from one of the most spectacular stretches of coast anywhere, and we've gotten to be one house away from that all this time. We have wonderful friends.

By the end of the day tomorrow, we will probably have belongings in three different houses. But by Sunday or Monday, everything will have gathered together into one house and we can start the process of settling in, putting up art, and deciding where everything goes.

And now I'm going to go blog at Growing Tables and go to bed.

One Up, One Down

So just in time for us to move to a different temporary place of residence (before moving to our permanent place of residence in a week and a half), Michael has come down with what Darcy had. So they're both in bed, she because a fun, active day after being sick wears a girl out, and he because being sick wears a man out.

And I'm here blogging about it, hoping that Michael recovers as quickly as Darcy did and that I don't get it.

Darcy and I drove up the coast today, to one of her favorite places: Bandon, OR. We had a good time, as the sun was shining, we didn't need coats, and we hit all the hot-spots, which now include a new cheese maker. I got a significant amount of Christmas shopping done at non-chain stores, which feels good despite the need to move the gifts a couple times. In speaking to a merchant, I actually built a great work connection and got a lead on a regional funder I didn't know about -- so yay for networking. 

The one downside was that we learned that our favorite beach-trash art group (and yes, we have one!) has opened a new and beautiful venue in downtown Bandon, but they are closed on Sundays! We could only peek in the window and dream of our next visit. The Washed Ashore Project is amazing and you should all check out their website to look at pictures. They collect trash from beaches (and accept donations, so I need to figure out a storage system so I can keep the stuff we pick up to take to them) and then sort it by color and material before making amazing sculptures out of them. The photos online do not do these things justice, but they're still worth checking out.

I'm hoping tomorrow brings us three healthy people, continued sunshine, and speedy packing.

It Was An Almost Perfect Day...

Sometime in the middle of the afternoon yesterday, I started thinking about what a great blog post I was going to have for last night. It was a gorgeous day, I had a very productive three hours of work in the morning, attended a lovely Thanksgiving potluck at Darcy's school, had a little free time while Darcy enjoyed herself at a birthday party, and then Darcy and I spent some time on the beach.

We wandered the sands and wondered about the odd arrangement of LOTS of seaweed, just in two small sections of the beach. And we watched an amazing sunset over Castle Rock.

It was all going so well. 

And then an hour after Darcy went to bed, we heard noises upstairs where there should be no noises. It was not a pretty sight. Poor girl was covered in vomit and we had a miserable three or four hours before her body was done getting rid of whatever had tried to invade.

That's my excuse for not blogging last night. 

And I'm blogging early-ish today because puking for half the night wears a child out and she fell asleep on the couch just before 5. I carried her up to bed without an eyelash moving and I will keep my fingers crossed that she can sleep straight through until morning.

Waiting For Downton

So Michael says that he might be "over" Downton Abbey because of the way they ended the last season. I agree that the fate of new parents on the show isn't fun, but I'm still looking forward to its return.

Today, I got a suggestion for something to while away the time until Downton returns. Broadchurch is a BBC detective series, something we often like. One of the more recent ones we've watched is Vera, with Brenda Blethyn as a detective on the moors. Apparently, there are more seasons than we've watched, so there's more waiting-for-Downton fodder. And in searching for a link to Vera (which is on Hulu), I found this article about Brit binge watching with a couple more suggestions including the UK version of House of Cards. Didn't know there was one.


(Had to make a new label. Apparently, I've never really written about tv before.)

Trees Of Mystery

So there's a slightly (?) cheesy tourist attraction just south of Crescent City called Trees of Mystery. There are good parts of it, but there's also a giant Babe the Blue Ox (anatomically correct) in front. I find it an odd place to go see redwoods, though, because there's beautiful old growth forest nearby, so I don't understand going to see named, not terribly old redwoods instead. But that's just me, and Trees of Mystery is a venerable institution.

The real trees of mystery are the redwoods themselves. I always appreciate them when I get to drive through them (as I may tomorrow). They are overwhelmingly ancient and wild and beautiful on an ordinary day. But then there are days when the sun and fog play together particularly well and people are able to get photos like this:

Michael was in the redwoods for such a day today. Pretty good for an iPhone, once again.

The Wonderful World Of Cheese

In true Darcy form, she has decided over the last six or eight months that she loves cheese. All cheese, of course, because she doesn't do anything by halves. 

At Halloween, she won the award for best girls' costume and got to choose a prize from a big basket of prizes. Her category was the first awarded. The basket was filled with chocolate bars of many kinds, games, toys, jars of olives. She chose the round of Humboldt Fog cheese, an rinded goat cheese with a layer of ash. And she loved that cheese.

As part of her birthday present, I found this magazine about cheese. It became her bedtime reading. Michael tells this story as if it is an odd choice, but this comes from a man who used to keep three encyclopedias of classical CDs by his bedside. 

Sunset

Moving across the country and back again in just over a year was never our choice of how life would go. But here are a couple reasons we did the "back again":

These pictures represent more than a gorgeous sunset on the beach. Darcy and Michael could go to the beach easily to enjoy that sunset because of our amazing social network here. When living with our friends became detrimental to Darcy's sleeping needs a month after we moved here, other friends offered their "one and a half bedroom" guest house for more or less as long as we needed it. The guest house is separated from this beach by one house and one road. So Darcy and Michael walked down the driveway, across the street, and there they were, on this unbelievably beautiful stretch of the Pacific coastline.

I'm A Bad Blogger

Apparently, trying to write two blogs daily is too much. I totally cheated and pre-blogged for Growing Tables so I didn't have to write over the weekend. But having done that, I justified not touching a computer for 48 hours.

We spent a good weekend running errands, walking on the beach, and seeing our friend's musical performed on the big, Crescent City stage. Now we're winding down the weekend and mentally preparing to move from our temporary lodgings to our house in a couple weeks. 

Many apologies for the missing blog posts and pictures that might have gone with them. I'll make it up somehow.

Books! I Love Them!

I've been reading a lot recently, both fiction and non-fiction. Finally got around to reading Salt, Sugar, Fat and was suitably horrified by what I learned. (Did you know that a half cut of Prego Traditional tomato sauce has as much sugar as three Oreos??) I'm in the middle of Michael Pollan's Cooked right now and enjoying it. I had been hesitating for some silly reason, but then saw it at the library.

But tonight, as soon as I finish writing this, I will open up a book I am very excited to start:

I love, love, love good speculative fiction, including some very dark dystopias. Margaret Atwood's trilogy, ending with MaddAddam, is definitely on the list of very dark dystopias. In anticipation of reading this final book, I reread the first two over the past couple weeks and found them just as good the second time around. (Might have been the third time around for Year of the Flood. Not sure about that.)

So now I'll bid you good-night so I can start reading! I just hope I can stop...

A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words

Oh, But She'll Be SEVEN!

Three years ago, almost exactly, we went with Darcy for a hike around Mill Creek Campground. It's closed in the winter, and so empty, and we shared pictures of Darcy playing a leaf-tossing game and the amazing world of moss and fungus.

Yesterday, we took Darcy and a friend to the same spot for some scootering. It was sunny and they had a great time, and once again, there were mushrooms everywhere:

For one of the first times around here, we also saw lots of puffballs, long past their prime. The first batch were on this stump:

But then we were on the lookout for them and found them on the ground in several different places. There was some puffball-stomping; the cloud at Darcy's feet is the spore cloud:

But our girl isn't four anymore, like in the first picture. Tomorrow morning, she will wake up and be SEVEN. How did that happen? Our little girl is disappearing into a grown-up body, but at least she still thrills over seeing banana slugs and stomping on puffballs and riding her scooter through dry leaves. She's moving on to other things, too, like helping our friend Michelle-the-baker make the chocolate cupcakes with chocolate mousse filling, chocolate buttercream frosting, and chocolate shavings that are going to school tomorrow. (Sorry, KRECR!!) But here she is, two days from her seventh birthday:

A Cheat

I am amazingly uninspired to blog today. We had a good day. We scootered around a closed camp ground -- one of the many exciting things Del Norte has to offer on beautiful fall days. We saw stumps covered in puffballs, climbing banana slugs, and many other wondrous things. Unfortunately, all of the images of wonder are still hanging out on Michael's phone.

So for your enjoyment, I present the other blog I'm writing for daily this month. Because I am a masochist.

Apparently, She Just Needed A Bed.

Oh cats. They're cute and furry, and they purr and sometimes let you pet them. They're fun when they play. And then there's 4:30 in the morning. 

That's when Paige likes to let us know how desperately she needs our love, how much she misses us in the night, and how empty her bowl is.

But not this morning! Yesterday, before heading off to the deliciousness of our Requa Inn dinner, we bought Paige her very own bed. She's never had a cat bed before, not exactly sure why not, but she hasn't. She'll sometimes crawl in with us for a while, but she doesn't stay long. 

It took her a while to warm up to it and hop in (and I had to add a towel she's been sleeping on to coax her interest), but once she did, she stayed in! All night long. At NINE O'CLOCK, when we woke up (thank you, S family for keeping our other early riser overnight!), she was curled up looking very proud of her very own bed. No early morning meows. No kneading me in my sleep. No paws on the face. 

She just needed her own little bed to be a wonderful morning cat.

If Your Menu Said...

Matsutake mushroom. Stinging nettle. Smoked sturgeon.

That was how our fifth course of a tasting menu was described tonight. I was picturing a roasted (?) mushroom, sauteed greens, and a small piece of fish. 

What would you picture?

What I didn't picture was a small white pitcher being put on my plate. It was tiny. Like an individual pitcher of cream that might come with a cup of coffee.

There was a green foam hiding the rest of the contents, but as I dipped my spoon in, I found a velvety mushroom soup, with shavings of smoked sturgeon at the bottom. It was not at all expected, but it was so good.

It was maybe a quarter cup -- maybe -- of complete deliciousness that made me wish my tongue was long enough to reach the bottom of that little pitcher. I didn't try, although I wanted to. We were, after all, seated at a table for six and had just met two of our dining companions as the meal began.

Michael and I splurged for a late anniversary dinner and went to the Historic Requa Inn's Beermaker's Dinner tonight. (He was in Pennsylvania for the deal deal last month.) It was eight courses of magical cooking -- not a single miss on any of the plates, starting with a halibut fillet on top of creamy wild rice and ending with a panna cotta served on caramel sauce. I used a leftover piece of fry bread to mop up extra sauce from the family-style serving dish. I'm not ashamed -- it was the perfect end to a perfect dinner.

From Reading To Stage!

A couple years ago, Michael and I helped our friend Ruthe by joining other friends to read her fantastic play, This is Crescent City, out loud for the first time. It got some edits out of that reading, a few more suggestions from my helpful cousin Seth, tons more work and sweat and thought from Ruthe, and last night, it premiered on the stage with the Lighthouse Repertory Theater!

The play is about our town's history and present, and what makes people choose to stay here. Our local newspaper has given it good coverage and with luck, that will be just the beginning of the conversations this play will inspire.

We'll be seeing it next weekend and babysitting so other friends can go see it this weekend. If you're nearby, you should choose a performance and GO. 

(And if you were admiring the poster, that's good. It's Michael's handiwork! Ain't he great?)

A Trip Down Memory Lane

Next week, I get to talk about my previous life in paleoethnobotany. I'm pretty stoked. I'm giving talks to students at two schools ranging from K to 12. I'll be doing three lectures for high schools students: anthropology, intro to paleoethnobotany methods, and prehistoric agriculture in North America. For the younger students, I'll be doing just the paleoethnobotany intro and the prehistory.

Today, I was trying to figure out what images I have access to without having all the slides I haven't gotten around to scanning. I found a few of the micrographs of my seeds and enough photos of my fieldwork in Mexico to make me happy.

Looking at my seeds and beautiful chapatas, along with fields of huauzontle and trucks piled high with produce in the wholesale street market made me feel nostalgic for those lovely Mexican crops. And that's appropriate, given that one of my dissertation's themes was the role of nostalgia in maintaining traditional foods.

Bubble Gum

It's possible we are somewhat restrictive parents. Darcy didn't eat cake until her second birthday and then it was an applesauce cake with almost no sugar in the cake or frosting. (We've made up for that -- she's had more than enough sugar in her life, but we started out well.) 

But one thing she still hasn't had is gum. I think. Although now that I'm writing this, I think I remember someone saying that she'd had a piece on an airplane at some point? Not sure about that. She got a piece of bubble gum during the trick or treat bonanza last week. Tonight, she got Michael to eat it and blow bubbles for her. She was unreasonably tickled by the whole thing and tried to touch each bubble he blew.

It's worth clicking on the picture to enlarge it to see her tongue sticking out of her mouth.

Ah. The Return Of Our Computer To My Life.

You probably have noticed the lack of photos (and posts) over the past few months. In part, that's because Michael had both our main computer and the camera, so photo taking and sharing has been difficult. Now the shared computer is in California, so I'm just going to poke through the archives and share a few cute photos of Darcy. I know it's what most of you like best anyway. Also, I spent eight hours at a culinary and agritourism training today, with an hour's drive at either end, so it was a long day and I'm tired.

Maybe not as tired as this pair, though. Darcy and Paige take a nap together (or at least pretend to) on our deck in Pennsylvania. She loves her cat and her cat loves her!

And here she is just being plain old silly. There's a sequence of these close-ups with strange faces involving Darcy and her cousin, so I think it was a Thing To Do during this visit. Silly girl.

Michael's HOME!

That's pretty much the whole story today. Michael rolled into town this morning. We all got to sit down to dinner together tonight and he is singing Darcy's bedtime songs right now.

Life is good.

The iPhone's Connected To The...Other iPhone?

Look! I managed to add a recent photo. This is our small cowgirl on Halloween. I'm still not exactly sure why she wanted to be a cowgirl, but she was insistent for a few weeks and there she is in her hat and boots.

This picture is brought to you by the wonders of modern technology. A friend took this picture with her phone, sent it to Michael on his phone. He posted it to Facebook by request, and I was able to grab it from there and post it to the blog. Ain't science and social media great?

Our Girl!

It's a rainy day out there this morning and I thought I'd get my blogging done for the day before even getting out of bed. I have no idea how I'm going to entertain the girl today and I'm sad because my rain coat is out in the car, which is not helpful.

A few weeks ago was California Indian Day. Darcy had it off from school, but the day before, they had a great day learning about Yurok and Tolowa traditions. The newspaper gave it some nice coverage, including a great picture of Darcy on the front page. It was how a few people learned we were back in town! 

As I said last night, Michael's getting closer and closer with himself and access to cameras and such. Maybe tomorrow, definitely early Monday! So you won't have to make do with links to interesting things for much longer.

Oh, Why Not?

So I was not planning to do NaBloPoMo this year. I was toying with the possibility of trying to write a novel or even doing the academic version of writing every day for a month, which apparently now exists. But both of those things seem to require more preparation and thought than I've given them, while blogging can be done a bit more on the fly.

This is my lame entry for the first day, just so there's something here.

Michael is currently driving across this beautiful country so he, too, can rejoin the ranks of the westerners. I will have more time AND access to photographs when he gets here, so I'll try to post lots of pictures of our ever-growing girl.

In the meantime, here's some of what I've been doing recently:

We had a great four days of Food Day celebrations last week, ending with this day of DIY Food Workshops, which were a big hit. You can read about the bigger plans and see the great coverage our local newspaper gave us here and here. The first article started on the front page and the second was the front page, above the fold of the B section. It was a whirlwind to put this together in the first seven and a half weeks on the job, but we did it and did it successfully!